A review of My 2016 stuff at Mechafatnick.co.uk

 

So now the dust’s settled and the last of the obscene mountain of post-Christmas nosh has been forced down, let’s have a quick look at how 2016 went at Mechafatnick.co.uk.

As my resolutions for 2015 didn’t go quite to plan, I avoided making any resolutions at all last year as the additional stress seemed unhelpful. As tempting as it is to codify something at the beginning of the year, I think I’m going to avoid making any for 2017 as I seem to work best when I’m mindlessly plugging away like some sort of horrendous human-bee hybrid.

I think this observation paid off last year on the music front as not only did i manage to finish my Megadrive-tinged Fusion Jazz album Modulated Frequencies in the style I intended, but I also managed to produce four separate single tracks i was happy with as well. Hooray.

 

modulated frequencies

 

My game has been a constant bug bear for the last couple of years. In 2015 i had the vague intention of making a game without really having a solid knowledge of exactly of  what needed to done. In 2016 I had a bolder, much more focused direction, but I still had a lot of blanks when it comes to the particulars of how the boring code stuff would actually work. As of January 2017, I have something that’s playable with a few game-breaking bugs (including a massive memory leak,) but I now feel like there isn’t any major problem that I can’t stand one way or the other (famous last words I know) so I do hope to have something to show you before 2018.

 

 

14 months ago I had no idea what i was doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing.

 

 

The writing I’ve produced around here has, I hope, been informative if not entirely fun. In January we looked at how useful my Everdrive had been in helping me become acquainted with the library of Sega’s first console, the SG-1000.  In March, we examined whether online gaming culture of the 80’s and 90’s was as toxic as the culture today, while in June I looked at the new Xbox and Playstation variants in the context of Sega’s disastrous add-on and upgrade schemes.

After that, thing’s got a bit “long-form.” In August, wrote an article explaining everything you may not know about the SNES Sound chip, and followed that up with an article on the surprising amount of involvement Yamaha had with the industry during the 1980s. In November, I also produced a couple of articles for skirmishfrogs.com explaining why the ZX Spectrum is probably still important to you even if it isn’t a machine you grew up with yourself.

That’s not to say I didn’t do a whole load of reviews as well. Alongside review a great/bad game day, I also chipped away at a couple of my GX4000 reviews and reviewed some cool stuff like Play Margate and my fancy new (now not so fancy and new) Korg Nanokey.

So  overall, I’m pretty impressed with the amount of stuff I managed to put up here last year. Thank you for taking the time to read it.  I hope you enjoy all the things i’m looking forward to uploading in 2017.

 

Happy new year and all that Jazz.

 

 

 

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